A Time Before Slaughter

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A Time Before Slaughter

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Shortlisted for the Stranger’s 2010 Genius Award in Literature. Books editor Paul Constant said: “They don’t get much more inventive than this…There are elegies, sonnets, prose poems, images, and even testy e-mail exchanges …forming a literary collage of a little city that usually escapes notice. Nelson brings a cacophony of voices together to form a chorus… In other words, he has built a city out of words. A city named Slaughter. And Auburn. It’s a brilliant achievement.”

Paul Nelson’s epic Slaughter explores the history, mythology and ecology of a place, a meeting-ground for various cultural interchanges, both good and bad, in the tradition of Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems or W.C. Williams’ Paterson, but uniquely his own. It is a pleasure to read—enlightening, serious, funny, and overflowing with life.

A TIME BEFORE SLAUGHTER walks with great poetical ability the fine and difficult line between the political and the poetical: a fine line that in most poets leads to the political tract, which shortsells the poetical. Paul Nelson, on the contrary, manages to deal with today’s world, and its terrible pitfalls, with an eye on creation and not on cheap lamentation: it results in a book where neither poetry nor nature, nor life or history, are tamed; they are exalted, in all its complex reality, through a sustained poetical state that turns A TIME BEFORE SLAUGHTER into an authentic work of art.